What’s New in the Sage CRM Integration for Sage 300 ERP 2012

With the forthcoming release of Sage 300 ERP 2012 we will be including a number of enhancements to our Sage CRM integration. This blog posting goes into the main improvements you will see with this release.

New Version of Sage CRM

With this release we will be bundling the newest Sage CRM 7.1 SP2. This service pack includes a number of nice improvements over the last release, including document attachment enhancements, mail merge enhancements and library management. You can read about these at the Sage CRM blog here.

Of course the nicest thing is getting a nice new re-mastered Sage CRM install image with all the various Service Packs and Hotfixes integrated along with the newest Sage 300 ERP integration components, so you only need to run one install to get to the new latest release.

Cross Browser Support

But for us, the biggest change is the support of browsers other than Internet Explorer. Sage CRM now supports Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. So for all the poor people out there struggling using IE 8 on Windows XP, you can now switch to Firefox or Chrome, and greatly improve your life. Similarly if you prefer using a computer not running Microsoft Windows you can now use that device/computer to access your Sage CRM.

As part of this, the Quote to Order feature in Sage 300 ERP 2012, now also supports running in these Browsers. The only thing you can’t do is drill down and run ActiveX screens from the older parts of our integration.

No More Crystal Enterprise, RAS or Sage Web Reporting by Crystal

When we ran Sage 300 ERP web deployed (the old way with ActiveX controls) we required the Sage Web Reporting by Crystal Server to print Crystal reports through the browser. We have now removed that requirement and you no longer need to install this component.

Installing and getting this running has always been a major trouble spot, especially on Windows Server 2008. Now you no longer need to install it, it is gone from the Web Deployment Wizard and hopefully your reporting will run much easier.

Since this has been such a problem for people installing on Windows 2008 Server we are also providing this particular feature as a hotfix for 6.0A.

Sales splits in Quotes to Orders

We released the new fully Web based Quote to Order integration into Sage CRM with version 6.0A. The intent of this screen was to fit seamlessly into Sage CRM and to provide the functionality required by salespeople entering orders. The goal was to make this screen far easier to use than the full regular Order Entry screen. As a result it had a subset of the functionality that we felt was required by salespeople.

However salespeople are extremely concerned about commissions and to them the glaring omission in the first release was the lack of the ability to enter sales splits for Orders. So for this release we are adding the sales split functionality into the header (as a collapsible frame). Below is a screenshot with the sales split parts visible. The functionality here is exactly the same as in the full Order Entry screen, since all the validations (like percentages adding to 100%) are done in the business logic which is shared by the two screens. Also note that everything is running in Firefox to highlight the cross browser capability.

Better Dashboard Integration

I talked about the improvements we are making to our SData support here. Just mentioning it again here since it does enhance our integration with the Sage CRM dashboard, making it easier to add Sage 300 ERP data to the Sage CRM dashboards via its SData widgets. We will be leveraging SData more and more in our integrations to seamlessly server up data from any application wherever it is required.

Summary

With each version we update to the newest version of Sage CRM and add a few enhancements to our integration. This blog posting just highlights the enhancements Sage CRM users will see when they upgrade to Sage 300 ERP 2012 and Sage CRM 7.1 SP2.

Hey Stephen,
Now that you don’t need Crystal Enterprise, RAS or Web reporting by Crystal but can apply the hotfix which will generate your reports in PDF, how or what is the answer to exporting your report to excel? One of the nice things about using the Crystal Engine (although a pain to get going), it gave you the ability to export (say, a trail balance) to Excel.
The web deployment doesn’t need this anymore but can you still run the Web Reporting on the server (and I’m particularly talking about 2008 R2) and have the reports generate in Crystal rather than PDF?

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